Kathy Davis

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

The focus of Kathy Davis’s research has been on women’s experiences with their bodies, on gender/power/relations in the various health care professions, and changes in cultural discourses and practices concerning the female body. She continues her research into the history of the women’s health movement as a grassroots feminist movement and its significance for feminist theory and practice during the past three decades in the United States and abroad. Her project ”Three Decades of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Feminist Body Politics in (Trans)Cultural Perspective” explores the history of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the first and most famous feminist collective in the women’s health care movement, and its classic book on women and health, Our Bodies, Ourselves. She will combine an oral history of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective with an analysis of the changes in the book during the past three decades and its international impact and significance for global feminism.

Davis is an associate professor in women’s studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She was an associate editor for The European Journal of Women’s Studies, an organizer of the XIV World Congress of Sociology, and the president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee of Biography and Society. She earned her PhD in social and cultural sciences from Free University, Amsterdam.